


The Breath Inside My Head

by TheColorBlue



Series: if wishes were horses (beggars would ride) [2]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Asthma, Gen, psychoanalytic approaches to pathology, the peculiar history of medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-24
Updated: 2012-09-24
Packaged: 2017-11-14 22:49:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/520323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheColorBlue/pseuds/TheColorBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers grew up believing that asthma was an illness of the mind rather than of the lungs. 9-1-1 and modern emergency medical services did not exist until the sixties. JARVIS has opinions about self-improvement and politics. </p><p>Warnings for a fic written from google and wikipedia research.<br/>Also, asthma is not a psychosomatic illness ("of or pertaining to a physical disorder that is caused by or notably influenced by emotional factors" (<a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/psychosomatic">x</a>))</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Breath Inside My Head

Steve Rogers remembered being six, and it was 1924, long before the Depression, and his mother had scraped together the money to call in a doctor to see Steve about his rheumatic fever. The doctor prescribed aspirin and plenty of bed rest, and before he went, Steve’s mother also asked about the asthma, which Steve had begun to suffer from as of late. The doctor frowned, and then said, “Well, Mrs. Rogers; as a nurse, I’m sure you’re aware that there’s no cure or medicinal treatment for asthma. Of course, I’ve heard that there’s psychoanalytic treatments that might help—“

Steve—who had been hot and fuzzy-minded with fever, also clinging to a tissue to stop a dribbling nose bleed—had seen his mother’s sharpening look from across the room.

“Psychoanalytic?” she asked. She sounded like she was weighing the words in the manner of weighing stones. 

“Well, yes,” the doctor said. “They’d try to talk to the boy, see if they can’t figure out what’s going on his head. Theory is that’s all asthma is, really: all in the head.”

“Poor Steve looked like he was slowly suffocating,” his mother said slowly. “I don’t know how—at any rate, Steve’s a good boy. I don’t think you’ll ever meet a boy with a better head on his shoulders—“

“Yes, well, I don’t doubt that, Ma’am. Of course; just seems to me that even good boys could be suffering from any kind of fears and wants—well, however you want it, you can leave the asthma untreated too, most people don’t die from it, however it looks—“

His mother and the physician left the bedroom, still talking, and his mother gently closed the door behind her. 

Steve stared at the ceiling, the faint, metallic taste of blood in the back of his throat. He was careful of the ache in his joints as he shifted ever so slightly under his sweat-dampened sheets. The asthma was all in his head, but the fever wasn’t, except where it was, and Steve dreamed uneasily all through the afternoon. He dreamed about beating back the silent phantoms that crept into your body, and that turned everything hot and sweating and airless. 

\--

Steve Rogers remembered being thirteen, and living with Bucky at the Sisters of Charity orphanage. At thirteen, he didn’t think of disease as anything phantom-like, but more of something to overcome. He fought long and hard. The year was 1931. You didn’t go to the hospital or ask for a doctor unless you were absolutely dying, that was the way Steve saw it. Where was the money to come from, anyway, and Steve didn’t like asking for more charity than he had any right to. 

Steve had tried to join a game of baseball with the other boys out on the street, only now he was sitting on a building stoop, trying to will his body to breathe normally through the coughing and the pressure in his chest. When the attack had passed, Steve sat back, sweaty and somehow both tense and limp at once, and Bucky waited a few moments before tentatively touching Steve’s shoulder. 

“Steve,” Bucky said, “I don’t know how a kid like you lives like this.”

Steve didn’t say anything, naturally, and Bucky obviously wasn’t looking for a response because he said, “The Sisters would probably say something about getting in plenty of prayer, but I don’t even know.” 

Steve didn’t answer, filling his aching lungs with blessed, if faintly acrid tasting air. Sister Margaret sometimes tutted and said that going out into the country probably would have done wonders for Steve’s health, but what was there to be done. 

Steve didn’t care, one way or another. Brooklyn was home. As for prayer—well, sure, he prayed every day, and was even sincere about it. He just knew that God also liked people to help themselves, and Steve would, by gosh. He’d fight to live every day, every second, because that’s what built a man, in the end. 

Bucky hollered at a kid who was saying maybe Steve was too much of a weakling to join the game. Bucky threatened to truss the kid up by his toes, and Steve would have snickered if it wouldn’t have hurt his chest to do so. 

\--

Maybe God really did answer prayers. Or helped those who fought their whole lives and hadn’t somehow keeled over in the idiotic attempt. 

Steve remembered opening his eyes in a new body. 

Literally. 

He remembered lightness and looseness, and the weirdest sense of not being quite there, and yet also fully there. 

Then there was the sound of the gunshot. 

Steve felt: this body was his, and it wasn’t his, and when he ran out onto street in his bare feet, he ran through the pain, and then there was no pain at all. 

\--

After the Chitauri invasion, Steve came in to help clear the streets and rescue people. 

Except, he couldn’t really rescue people, in some senses of the word. In the thick of battle, he could issue orders, but in the aftermath… There were people in uniforms who were trained to bring care to the injured. It wasn’t like in Steve’s day where you did the best you could to carry everyone to the hospital, any way that you could. 

9-1-1 did not exist in Steve’s day. Neither did the terms “paramedic” or “emergency medical technician.” A black woman in uniform told him to give them space when they came upon two teenage boys. They had been injured and taken cover by a store front. One of them was lying on the sidewalk, his leg clearly giving him pain and, “we can’t just move them,” the paramedic told Captain America. “We need to stabilize the kid to prevent further injury; so thanks, but we’ll take this from here.” 

Captain America was really only around at the moment to make sure that there were no further threats from the Chitauri and Loki present. Or maybe it was just to boost moral, Steve wasn’t quite sure, as he caught the eye of a SHIELD agent across the street, and went over to get an update on SHIELD’s on-going activity in the area. 

\--

After the Chitauri, things seemed to move in a strange way. 

Within two months, Steve somehow found himself living in Stark Tower. Stark had…offered, for some reason, and SHIELD had encouraged the captain to get some fresh air and find residence off HQ—while still being protected in a high security building, not so far from SHIELD facilities, really. 

Steve had an entire floor to himself. Tony Stark mostly left Steve alone, which was kind of nice, actually. Pepper Potts came by every once in a while to make sure he was all right, and would invite him up for dinner, and Bruce Banner had been given a floor as well—but they all had their own lives. That’s the way it felt to Steve. They were all… well, people were busy. Steve tried to keep busy. 

There was a voice that sometimes talked to him from the ceiling: JARVIS. The first day, JARVIS had politely announced his presence when Steve was looking around, and had told him to but ask, and JARVIS would be more than happy to assist sir what whatever he needed in navigating the tower. 

Sometimes, Steve found himself just talking to JARVIS, and it was…nice, when JARVIS talked back. 

“I see that sir seems to be positively benefiting from his on-going studies,” JARVIS said, while Steve sat on his couch and read from an EMT training textbook.

“Yeah,” Steve said. 

Then, “I mean, between this and the drawing classes—yeah, it has been nice,” he admitted. 

His legs were sprawled out over the cushions. He had a glass of tomato juice on the coffee table. SHIELD had arranged everything; getting him into courses and all of that. 

He felt…a little better these days, a little. He felt like he had a place—a literal place, here at the Tower—but also…being in classes was focusing. He could try to focus on the things that mattered, rather than worrying about being out of his time, out of the cultural loop. 

Sometimes he wondered, though. What it was like for men, back in his day, to have come back from the war. To come back and settle down and to feel…well. What was there that you were supposed to feel, anyway? Men laying down their lives, and the fight against evil being over. 

The fight wasn’t over. SHIELD’s repaired helicarrier was flying somewhere high over the city, and with it the promise of other dimensions and all manner of potential threats, and sometimes Steve saw Phil Coulson when Pepper had arranged for group dinners, and still there was that feeling Steve knew—

It struck Steve, as he was resting his hand against the photographs of medicines and men and women in uniform. 

There were certain things that he couldn’t forget. The heightened tension of battle. The tightening in his chest that meant he wouldn’t be able to breathe. There were certain things that he couldn’t shake out of his head.

Yet it helped to read. It helped to have this kind of light in the room and a glass of tomato juice, and to have groceries for grilled cheese sandwiches if he wanted them, and maybe strangely, or not strangely at all, it helped to have that voice to talk to. 

Steve was still trying to convince JARVIS to stop calling him Sir, but for some reason JARVIS clung to that one. 

“JARVIS, you know; doctors used to think asthma was a mental problem, and now it’s not. They have real treatments for it now. Just, it’s amazing.”

“How strange the history of medicine appears to be,” JARVIS said. “All the more commendable to see you applying yourself so enthusiastically to modern studies.”

“Well. I like to hope that things really have changed for the better.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“… And no more wisecracks about politics or that Republican fellow you hold in such contempt these days, I’m looking for a positive atmosphere here. In my socks. With my tomato juice.”

There was a pause, almost like a laugh. “I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”


End file.
